All My Puny Sorrows

When Elf Von Riesen is young, she falls in love with a line from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem. In the poem, titled “To A Friend, With An Unfinished Poem,” the speaker says: “I too a sister had, an only Sister— / She lov’d me dearly, and I doted on her! / To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows” (231). Elf falls in love with the last line of this excerpt and then incorporates it into a new signature for herself. The signature combines her initials with the acronym AMPS, which stands for “all my puny sorrows.” Elf then begins to tag various locations around East Village with AMPS when she starts “work[ing] on ‘increasing her visibility’” (13). In a retrospective passage, Yoli remarks that there “are still red spray-painted AMPSs in East Village today although they are fading” (15). The AMPS tag therefore symbolizes legacy. The letters relate to Elf’s complex interiority while simultaneously speaking to her love for literature and art. The lingering AMPS tags are furthermore a reminder of Elf’s childhood energy and vivaciousness.

The AMPS tags also relate to the novel’s title and Yoli and Elf’s relationship. Because the originating Coleridge poem is about sisters, the “all my puny sorrows” line offers insight into Elf and Yoli’s complex connection (231), suggesting that they, too, view each other as the person who will imbue their “puny sorrows” with significance.